Final Fantasy 6's Poisoning of Doma

My year-long rant vacation continues!  But since I traditionally take June off from ranting to rest up after the busy season at my job, I figured, why not fully invert things and take some of June off from resting up to throw a rant up here?  So here we are, the mid-year break from taking a break, typed up and ready to go!

Of course, you might expect that, after such an absence and before resuming that same hiatus, I might at the very least leave you with something insightful and profound.  But you probably wouldn't, because I make this joke every time I do something like this, so yeah, today's just a stupid rant where I indulge my dumb sense of humor.  Except that it's somehow even worse than that, because it's also an adaptation of a conversation I once had in the comments section of 1 of my rants--and no, I don’t possess enough shame to apologize for that.  Enjoy the reminder that maybe we're all better off when I don't upload!



It’s funny the kind of stuff you’ll just nod your head and accept when a game’s good enough.  I’ve spoken about the weight of quality allowing for a greater weight of disbelief to be suspended and balanced against it, and I definitely think that the Doma incident of Final Fantasy 6 is a good example of this, because...there is no way anyone would buy the poisoning of Doma if Final Fantasy 6 were a lesser RPG.  Had we been any less engrossed in and entertained by the story of Final Fantasy 6 as it progressed, this moment would probably have been immortalized as an example of when a writer has to overreach and make a story event happen no matter what.  Because Doma’s poisoning doesn’t make any damn sense when you scrutinize it on any level.

Alright, so let’s just go over the events here.  Sabin sneaks into the Empire’s camp from which it’s launching its invasion of Doma.  He opens some treasure chests, beats up some guard dogs maybe, and winds up eavesdropping as Kefka reveals he’s gonna poison everyone in Doma to wrap up this whole invasion in a jiffy.  Sabin steps in, attacks Kefka, chases him around, tries to stop him, but gets caught up in fighting guards while Kefka slips away.  Kefka goes up to the nearby river, by himself, and puts his poison into it.  We then cut to Doma Castle, where a lookout remarks to Cyan that the Imperial camp is full of activity--presumably the havoc that Sabin is causing--after which Cyan notices that the water looks odd (a nice touch is that the color of the water at the beginning of this scene, seen at the corner of the screen, is different from the color of the water by this point; the water becomes more discolored as the scene plays out).  Doma guards suddenly start dropping dead left and right, Cyan and the lookout realize poison’s at work, Cyan races through the castle and finds that the king and pretty much everyone else is dead, including his own wife and son.  Infuriated, he runs out to the Imperial camp to start killing everyone he can.

So yes, it’s a great and memorable scene in RPG history.  Very diabolical.  Very unsettling.  Very tragic!  Very moving!  Very...uh...very........um, say, how far away from Doma was the Imperial camp, again?

Uh huh, uh huh...okay...yeah...mmmhm...so...relative to our own planet, about the distance from Switzerland to Portugal.

Man, that one lookout guy has got really good eyesight.

I’m sorry, you’re telling me that the poison that Kefka dumped into the river was able to travel along a body of water that looks to be equivalent in length to the Red Fucking Sea over to Doma inside, what, 10 minutes?  20?  An hour, tops?  Remember, the scene in which Doma’s citizens succumb to the poison opens with the lookout noticing the extra activity in the Imperial camp, and the implication of that is that Sabin is still currently causing a ruckus over there, so the maximum amount of time between Kefka dumping the poison and its taking effect is however long we can realistically assume Sabin can keep fighting off an entire camp of enemies without getting killed or captured--he is, after all, fully free and able to come assist Cyan later, when Cyan arrives at the camp to take his vengeance.  So unless you think Sabin A: can, at this time, successfully combat presumably dozens or hundreds of armed opponents for hours without a break and essentially solo an entire military invasion army, or B: retreated at some point (leaving the camp still noticeably active) and decided to just chill and let this whole poison thing work itself out without his further intervention, neither of which seem terrifically likely, then we have to accept a timeline in which the river has managed to bring Kefka’s poison from the camp all the way to Doma within, at the absolute most generous estimation, an hour.

Honestly, for anyone getting a drink from the Doma river that day, poison should have been the least of their concerns.  The speed those waters were going would’ve left anyone who bent down for a sip missing the bottom half of their skull!

But okay, let’s back up a bit.  We can’t really say that we know how far away the Imperial camp was from Doma, because we don’t know the size of FF6’s world relative to our own.  Maybe FF6’s entire globe is only as big as, say, our own world’s state of Texas.  Maybe Cyan’s ability to run all the way from the castle to the enemy camp before Sabin’s rampage has ended isn’t evidence of the popular fan theory that he was secretly Sonic the Hedgehog all along.  We don’t know the metrics of FF6’s world, and it’s not likely that the random Doma lookout NPC had telescopes implanted into his eye sockets at birth, so logically we should at least allow for the possibility that the actual distance that the river covered between these 2 points was not terribly far.

Maybe not so short a distance that this scenario’s time frame could still make sense, but, uh, it’s not too far-fetched, right?

Certainly not as unbelievable as the striking efficacy of Kefka’s poison, that’s for sure.  Holy crap, just how potent is this stuff?  The guy drops 1 dose of the stuff into the river by his own camp (sure hope no one on HIS side was planning to have a drink between now and the end of their tour of duty), and that’s enough to pollute the water supply of the entire castle so thoroughly that almost the entire population succumbs to it!

I mean just think of the logistics for a moment here.  We don’t see a barrel sitting next to Kefka during the scene of releasing the poison, nor any other large object that could be a container.  Whatever amount of poison he has, it can’t be more than what he can realistically carry on his person--and even then, there has to at least be enough free space on him that he can take a couple hits from Sabin in their preceding fights without the impacts dislodging, freeing, or otherwise causing a loss of the poison.  There’s an implication that the poison is in a quantity and container accessible enough that it was handed off to him by a subordinate, even.  So it’s basically, at the maximum, as much poison as 1 guy could carry, being spread through an entire river, and somehow there’s still enough of its presence uniformly in the water after its journey to be fatally ingested by not just a few, but dozens of people.

Holy shit, Kefka, what kind of insane fatality-to-ppm rating does that toxin have?  This stuff makes botulinum toxin look like ketchup by comparison!  That poison’s knocking people dead after being more diluted than the fruit flavor in a can of La Croix!  Forget being so prevalent that the entire body of water turns purple from it--given the volume of water surrounding and running through parts of Doma Castle alone, the Imperial camp could be just down the street from Doma and it’d still be a miracle for there to be enough poison molecules to go around for everyone in the castle to manage to get some in their next cup!

Actually, the real miracle is how everyone in the castle even managed to drink this poisoned water to begin with.  I mean, the water only starts turning purple moments before the residents of Doma begin keeling over from it.  Like, the river’s normal-colored at the beginning of the scene, Cyan and Lookout Lad exchange something like 5 sentences, and by that point the water is noticeably discolored and the bodies start hitting the floor.  If we’re supposed to take the water turning purple as an indication of the poison’s arrival, that means that the first guy that we see die would barely have had the time to get a sip of the water if he’d been STANDING in the stuff.  And he most certainly wasn’t; he was up on the ramparts, in fact!  The implication here is that somehow this guy had the ability, as Cyan and Lookie-Loo exchanged a total of 4 text boxes, to dash a glass through the water, take a gulp, and then run up to the second floor and across the length of the castle in order to get in place for his collapse, IF we’re generous enough to assume that he started down where the water was.

Meanwhile, the king’s sitting in the middle of the castle, fully isolated from the river, yet somehow has also managed to get ahold of the magical purplewater in time to have collapsed before Cyan shows up--and we have to assume that he was drinking at about the same time as everyone else nearby, because otherwise His Majesty was watching his court fall to their knees gurgling in agony all around him after taking a sip break, and thinking to himself “Ooh, Imma have what they’re having.”  Doma’s royalty had to have some of the most ferociously dedicated and fleet-footed water-boys ever conceived for one to have fetched a drink from the river as Cyan notices it discoloring and gotten it to the king before any kind of the commotion of people dropping dead in droves could catch up to him.  There’s so little room for error that the royal water courier must’ve just plunged his head into the river, filled his cheeks up with water, made a mad dash for the throne room, and the moment King Doma opened his mouth to ask what the fuck was up, spat the entire volume of it into his face.

Why’s the king drinking the same dirty river water as everyone else, by the way?  What, there’s like, not a single cask of wine or mead or such left in the entire castle?  You’d think that if the castle was already that low on supplies, Cyan wouldn’t have been so hot for the “lock the doors, board up the windows, and let the walls do their job” strategy that he suggested last time we saw him and that I employ every time I hear my doorbell go off.

But hey, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that we’re not beholden to the actual water coloration timeline.  We’ll say it’s a narrative flourish, not literal, and the poison’s already present in the water as soon as Kefka pours it in, rather than just once we’re visually alerted.  It STILL doesn’t make any damn sense.  We’re still stuck to the timeframe of Sabin’s fight actively occurring in the camp, so that means that, at some point in the past hour, every single person in Doma besides Cyan and Sir Looksalot got thirsty.  I know hydration’s important, but you’re telling me that only 2 people in the entire castle were too busy to grab a drink in the past hour?

And keep in mind, everyone’s dying at about the same time, with only intervals of seconds between them.  So not only was EVERYONE in Doma both thirsty and picky like that kid in Signs who doesn’t want to drink water that’s been in a cup for more than 30 seconds, they all just happened to drink the water simultaneously.  From the guards to the civilians to the king, everyone must have had a water break at functionally the same time.  There was, over the course of that morning, a point at which the safety of the entire kingdom was held in the hands of exactly 2 individuals, as every other soldier in the entire military went on a synchronized water break.  What, did the king just happen to host a ritualized, communal Koolade meeting every morning--one that Cyan and Looksmaxxor93 weren’t invited to--and through some tragic cosmic irony this drinking tradition happened to end the same way as the last time someone did it?

No matter how you look at it, the Doma poisoning event is ridiculous.  Whether it’s the river needing to flow with a power and speed that would make most water jet cutters envious in order to deliver the poison in time, the poison somehow being so incomprehensibly effective that the amount a single person can carry will so lethally pervade an entire geographical body of water that dozens of people can all take a sip and be guaranteed to have ingested a lethal dose, or the fact that an entire settlement’s worth of people minus 2 managed, regardless of location, responsibility, or circumstance, to all happen to take a drink of water within the same 60-second window of the same hour of the day, the logistics and requirements for it are ludicrously impossible.

And because that’s amusing to poke fun at, I’ve written this rant.  But I do have to say, it also kind of makes this scene a testament to just how good Final Fantasy 6 really is--in a game that wasn’t so compelling and engrossing, we’d be removed enough from its events as an audience to recognize the absurdities of this situation and chuckle at the stretch it’s making.  But in FF6, we’re caught up in the flow of its storytelling enough that we don’t have enough distance to question the logistics of Doma’s poisoning; all we experience is the tragedy of Cyan’s loss and the outrage of Kefka’s evil, and all we remember is a poignant milestone in a great plot.